Original photo by Stuart Seeger/Flickr

WTF Friday: What We’re Terrified of This Week (Commies, Ebola, Muslims, Cat GIFs)

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Above: A Communist stronghold somewhere in Falls County.

I don’t know about you but I’m already terrified of the next crisis. I don’t know what it is, but it’s probably going to be really, really scary—like, scarier than the current crisis. Which is Ebola, right? Or is it ISIS coming across the border bearing Urdu dictionaries, prayer rugs/soccer jerseys and, let’s say, also Ebola? Or is it:

Or are we still terrified of those leprous illegals from Central America who came here to steal jobs/spread disease? I haven’t heard much about those kids (who aren’t really kids) lately so that probably means they’re up to no good and Obama is covering it up. The point is: Be scared. Be afraid. See you at the polls.

1) First of all: communists. We all know they’re out there… biding their time till they can get into the Texas House of Representatives and join forces with Speaker Joe Straus. Democrat, Republican, doesn’t matter. Communism is on the march, no more so than in House District 149, an ethnically diverse slice of suburban Houston currently represented by Democrat Hubert Vo, whose communist leanings include owning dilapidated apartment complexes with “leaky ceiling, rats and high energy bills.”

His opponent, Republican businessman Al Hoang, according to Vo supporters, might also be a communist. And communists do what communists do: Grab the nearest boxcutter.

The rough-and-tumble campaign for state representative in District 149 escalated as police arrested a campaign supporter for Republican candidate Al Hoang for allegedly threatening his opponent’s supporter with a boxcutter.

On Monday afternoon, a Hoang campaign volunteer, Peter Vo, reportedly brandished a boxcutter at an early voting location and cut through a banner that called Hoang a Communist. That’s quite the insult in this southwest Houston district, which is slightly under 20 percent Vietnamese. The campaigns have accused each other of not being sufficiently anti-Communist.

2) Also scaring the tar out of us this week every week: What else? Muslims. Jeffrey Swindoll is a young man who attends Baylor University and covers sports for the Baylor Lariat. He doesn’t like “politically correct” because it isn’t “always right.” It’s not right, he writes, for everyone to go around “defending Islam” by pointing out that the vast majority of Muslims are not violent jihadists. Swindoll is taking the fight to political correctness with an arsenal of mixed metaphors:

There are a lot of problems with the national discussion about the terrorist group known as the Islamic State (also referred to as ISIS or ISIL), terrorism, and Islam as a whole. The majority of those problems come from non-Muslims that are bending over backwards to defend Islam without a leg to stand on.

Which sounds like one hell of a yoga move.

Unfortunately, Obama isn’t interested in addressing the reality of Islam. He’s more interested in making the American worldview a liberal pipe dream. Liberals are using one hand to throw Christianity out of the window while using the other hand to pull out the chair for Islam to sit at the head of the table. It doesn’t make sense, but that’s exactly what they’re doing.

Guess who’s coming to dinner? Islam, that’s who. Liberals, they’ve only got good manners when terrorists are guests. It doesn’t make sense.

The point is: Be scared. Be afraid. See you at the polls.

Swindoll cites several verses from the Quran to prove, definitively, that Muslims are violent extremists and complains that followers of Islam have a “literal” interpretation of their holy book. Meanwhile, at Baylor, professors must be Christian (or Jewish!) and students are expected to share the “conviction that truth has its ultimate source in God and by a Baptist heritage…” But, hey, God picked a hell of a football team.

When the voice of tolerance and reason is Ken Starr, perhaps you’ve gone too far.

3) This week, we also quivered (in a non-sexual kind of way) at the thought of Gays in the Military, led by (shocker!) Louie Gohmert. The East Texas statesman was on the radio this week glitter-bombing us with his wisdom:

“I’ve had people say, ‘Hey, you know, there’s nothing wrong with gays in the military. Look at the Greeks,'” he said. “Well, you know, they did have people come along who they loved that was the same sex and would give them massages before they went into battle. But you know what, it’s a different kind of fighting, it’s a different kind of war and if you’re sitting around getting massages all day ready to go into a big, planned battle, then you’re not going to last very long.”

You’re not going to last very long when you’re getting a gay back massage. OK, Louie. Time to set the “Days Since Louie Has Said Something Hilarious” sign back to zero.

4) We were also frightened by juries of our peers this week. Here’s proof that there’s merit to the old tough-guy boast “I’d rather be carried by six than judged by 12”: The jury in the re-trial of Ed Graf, a Waco man who spent the last 25 years in prison based on faulty arson science, had a little trouble with the notion of “unanimous”:

5) Most apocalyptic of all though was the revelation of the true face of evil this week. Few people probably remember it, but one of the weirdest and distressingly stupidest moments of the lieutenant governor primary was the sudden emergence of cat GIFs and BuzzFeed-style political ads.

DewFeed

Well, now we have an extensive profile in Bloomberg about the man who introduced Dan Patrick to the Internet Culture. His name is Vincent Harris and he’s a 20-something Austin millennial religious fundamentalist who listens to Lana Del Rey in his BMW while doing 95 on the toll road, man, and is totally on a Paleo diet. #YOLO. He’s getting rich making Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell cool for the Yo set. He’s explaining BuzzFeed to Dan Patrick.

In August 2013, trying to build support for Texas State Senator Dan Patrick as Patrick aimed to knock off David Dewhurst, still the lieutenant governor, in the GOP primary, Harris conjured up the idea of a BuzzFeed spoof that used the Internet’s most popular animal diversions to castigate Dewhurst for not stopping State Senator Wendy Davis’ legendary filibuster against an anti-abortion measure. Patrick, who was initially nervous about whether such an approach would diminish him, was persuaded by Harris to take a gamble that ended up drawing copious press coverage and more than doubled his social media following.

“When he laid that out last August, I didn’t know what BuzzFeed was, I didn’t know what a gif was,” says Patrick, 64. “DewFeed was one of many things we did over the last 14 months. It wasn’t a game changer. It didn’t decide the election. Did it help? I think so. It’s hard to know.”

Dan Patrick, talk-radio show guy who once had a vasectomy performed on the air and was filmed shirtless while Houston Oilers cheerleaders painted him in blue, thought maybe it was maybe going too far. LOL. OMG. What’s next? Patrick’s plan to hike the sales tax explained with a Buzzfeed quiz? Patrick’s latest tete-a-tete with God over legislation disseminated via Snapchat?

And Harris isn’t done. He’s got a whole generation of bright minds working at his downtown office using their talents to turn complex geopolitical machinations and weighty electoral choices into trivial memes:

In one corner, a young woman ponders how to turn a remark over the weekend by Iranian president Hassan Rouhani in support of Hamas and Hezbollah into a gif that will help drive traffic to an advocacy group’s Facebook page. Nearby, a co-worker puts the finishing touches on a classic Concentration-style game in which each matching pair of cards offers a way Alison Lundergan Grimes agrees with President Obama.

When fascism comes to America it will be wearing a smiley emoji.